The first food producing society, based on wheat-barley cultivation and domesticated sheep-goat-cattle, at Mehrgarh in Baluchistan has already been discussed in the previous Unit. Here, we turn to India beyond the arc of Baluchistan-Indus-Hakra-Gujarat and to the archaeology and geography of the various agricultural-pastoral communities in the subcontinent’s other segments.
Early Agricultural-Pastoral Communities from Vindhyas to Ladakh
One of the earliest such cultures is located in the Vindhyan range of southern Uttar Pradesh and adjacent segments of Madhya Pradesh, at places like Koldihawa and Kunjhun. The archaeology of these sites shows a neolithic stratum. Their inhabitants used polished stone axes and microliths as also handmade pottery and lived in wattle and daub houses. Most importantly, this is an early rice cultivating community which, among other things, is evident from the husks of this cereal that are embedded in the clay of the pottery. Even if there are uncertainties about whether this cereal was independently domesticated here or about the chronology of its first cultivation – of the nine radiocarbon dates of Koldihawa, only three go back to the 7th and 6th millennia BC – there is little doubt that we are looking at the earliest rice growing culture of the Indian subcontinent. The dates from Kunjhun II clearly attest that such a society had been established in the Vindhyas by the 4th millennium BC. More recent excavations at Lahuradeva (Sant Nagar district) in Uttar Pradesh suggest that such early rice cultivation was not just confined to the Vindhyan hills but extended into the Gangetic alluvium. The earliest cultural occupation there (marked by coarse red ware and black and red ware, with cord impressions on its exterior) has yielded grains of cultivated rice and its calibrated dates are found the late sixth and early fifth millennium BC.
The possibility of an early transition from hunting-gathering cultures to agriculture and pastoralism in certain other areas may also be considered, although the evidence is not unambiguously clear. For instance, in the Ladakh region, the neolithic site of Giak is as early as the sixth millennium BC (calibrated radiocarbon date), although another site of the same cultural complex has yielded a c. 1000 BC date. Another such case is that of Rajasthan, where the salt lakes of Didwana, Lunkaransar and Sambhar have yielded cerealia type of pollen in a c. 7000 BC context, along with comminuted/charcoal pieces. This is apparently indicative of forest clearance and the beginning of some sort of agriculture. However, to archaeologically confirm the lake evidence, food producing cultures of similar antiquity will have to be discovered in Rajasthan. Taken together, the evidence from Ladakh to the Vindhyas does seem to indicate that the advent of food production in India was not a single event but was made up of multiple strands.